I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.
In my copious free time, I write for Wired, GQ and elsewhere on the emerging digital culture, from gaming giants to adventurous startups, and provide creative insight for technology companies. In previous lives, I managed corporate communications for a large software company, and was a senior creative at a Hoxton agency. But then again, who wasn't?
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At the preview of Star Trek: The Video Game I took the opportunity to sit down with Brian Miller, SVP of Paramount Pictures and Producer of the game.

Ship to ship combat. Exclamation point.

(Miller actually has a far more complicated title, which would largely be used internally: SVP, Worldwide Marketing Partnerships and Consumer Products. This is interesting in itself, in terms of how Paramount relates to the broader world of its IP).

One of the elements hit hard in the marketing for Star Trek: The Video Game is the close relationship between the development of the film and the development of the game – and, specifically, that both were handled centrally by Paramount. This is a contrast to the classic paradigm of licensed game development.

The birth of a notion

Some of the first recognizable computer games were spaceship combat simulators more or less obviously patterned on the model of Star Trek, with text-based input allocating power to phasers, shields and so on.

As the original Wild West atmosphere of computer gaming settled down in the early 80s, the tie-in game was generally farmed out – a game developer bought the rights, and then went off and made a game, usually based on a shooting script, concept art and some set design.

These games often followed the plot of the film, and were also often not very good, or actively bad – not least because, having paid for the license, the studio went into the creation process already registering a loss on the balance sheet, and so often sought to produce a minimum sellable product. Sometimes, as a result of changes to the script, technical limitations or liberal interpretation of the available materials, it also had a decidedly odd relationship to the licensed property. This process has created some legendarily unsuccessful games, first and most famously Atari’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, which presaged the great video game crash of 1983.

(This tendency was brilliantly homaged in Scott Pilgrim vs the World: The Game, incidentally, where the game was designed to look as if it had been put together by a design team with an idea of the main characters, sets and set pieces of the film, but no real idea of how they fit together or why.)

As media money has swung progressively away from traditional profit paths and into new areas, this relationship has started changing. Anyone telling you that the video games industry is now “bigger” than the film industry is probably trying to sell you something, but certainly this stuff is important, and IP owners are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of games to help or harm a brand. One need look no further than Aliens: Colonial Marines, where a fierce push for canonicity and relatability to the source movie has, in the view of many, resulted in a product that succeeds better as a series of references to the film Aliens than as a game.

Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of ViaCom, has a considerable portfolio of licensable IPs, the most currently noticeable of which is Star Trek. However, it has no vertically integrated AAA video game production facility. Paramount Digital Entertainment, therefore, is a mix of license arbitration house and brand protector. At the first hands-on preview of Star Trek: The Video Game, I spoke to Paramount Pictures SVP Brian Miller about his work on the game.

Manning the bridge – Brian Miller was tasked with extending the new Star Trek brand into a full-release video game

I have a couple of questions about the game, and then some busines questions. First up, while I was watching you present I got a tweet from a friend saying “Ship to ship combat!” – with an exclamation point. So, I should probably ask about that. I understand that at some point you get to pilot the Enterprise. Is that a sort of shooting gallery experience, or…

BM: We took a nod from the classic “Arena” episode [of the original Star Trek series] with the Gorn. The Gorn attacked an outpost and then started to flee, and Kirk chased them down to try to blow them out of the sky. In our game the Gorn steal a device which you got a little bit of a hint of in the preview [at a guess, it's a genesis device of some kind, but this is a guess, not a spoiler], and you get to man the Enterprise and actually play as the ship.

So yes, there are a ton of ship-to-ship combat “exclamation point” moments that we do, and it’s really done in a co-op way. So, if you play as one character you get to shoot the guns, while the other character mans the torpedoes. There is some great narrative we build in to show how vicious our creatures [sc. the alien Gorn, the antagonists of the video game] are. It is not just “let’s just shoot some ships out of the sky”. They do some things that really change up that gameplay. You also get to – and I’ve never told anyone this before – but you get to manually fly a torpedo from a third-person perspective into a Gorn ship through a massive debris field. So, it’s pretty fun.

The other thing I was going to ask quickly about the gameplay – the “bro-op”. You can do this as couch play or online play… how are you finding, in testing, that people are playing?

It’s funny, it really is a different thing depending on who you play. We have some moments in the game when Spock can do a mind meld on some Vulcans who have been [possible spoiler redacted]. In order to get access codes that are in their heads, or to get a little more of the story you have to be Spock. And if you’re playing as Kirk and dialled up online, and your friend is like “oh my God, did you see that?”, you [will be] like “No! I didn’t get to see it. I didn’t get to do a mind meld.”

For us it’s exciting because when you finish the game you want to be able to take that controller and give it to your other player. So we have been testing it and playing it through all the different modes, online or couch to couch or single player.

It’s been a great experience. For me it’s always great to play a co-op game with a live person, but we wanted to make sure that we designed the game so that if you wanted to play at by yourself, or if you wanted to jump into one of those missions alone again, because you really like it and wanted to revisit it as another character, you really could.

So, you unlock chapters for replay as either character as you finish them?

Sure.

And on a slightly related note, I guess… you can’t switch characters within a level, but can you switch between levels?

No! We want you to pick a character at the beginning, and play through the game as that character. We think that’s the right way to experience a narrative and a story like this, which is to make you play through. It’s not a game where you can switch over to Spock level by level, because we felt that wasn’t telling the story correctly. So we’ve set up the game so you can pick your character upfront.

And it’s a linear narrative. There isn’t online multiplayer, effectively, but a campaign narrative that the characters play through. How long is the campaign?

I think it depends on how you want to play. If you want to run and gun your way through it, I think 10 hours is a really nice answer to that. But there is a lot more to explore in the game, other than “I’m just going to shoot my way through”. Which is again something that we designed. If that’s the game you want to play, you can, but there are a lot of other things hidden in the game. For example, we have audio logs. Every one of our crew has recorded logs, so you get to hear Sulu’s diary, or hear from Scottie or Uhura, and their take on what;s been happening.

We also have a character in the game called [possible spoiler redacted], a Starfleet commander who is involved in this plot. We learn that he is maybe not the most noble character. And when you find his audio recordings, you’re rewarded by learning a little more about the backstory. And that’s something we can’t do in a film. It allows us to really make this a much broader piece, which is really what the gaming world expects.

And I guess that there’s the opportunity to wander around the Enterprise?

Absolutely, and we have the moment where you get to walk through the bridge. We actually get to visit the Enterprise several different times. You start in the beginning of the game, getting orders and going down. There is another level where you are chasing one of the Gorn on the Enterprise, so basically you have to run through and capture him, and go into areas we have never shown before, like the crew quarters, the turbo lift shafts and some of these other great places that we have not really shown.

And then, later on in the game, we have [spoilers redacted]. And you get to play the Enterprise, of course in “Ship to ship combat exclamation point!”.

Speaking of something you said on stage… Star Trek as a universe has been so influential – there are a lot of games and films and TV shows that have that kind of look and world to them – space shops, space stations, some sort of Starfleet or Federation or Alliance of Planets. You are working with the original IP, of course, but how do you fight free of that familiarity?

Well, they say imitation is a great form of flattery… You look at a lot of these games, and a lot of these properties that have been inspired by Star Trek, and it is a difficult task to try to make it new again. I think we had similar obstacles and challenges when we were making the last film, which was how do we get Star Trek back to what it should be, and how we reintroduce the world to it.

So, for us it was a very conscious decision to really look at what Star Trek was at its core and put that into gameplay. And I think Star Trek is a strong enough IP and strong enough brand to be able to outshine some of the imitators.

But some of the bigger ones you’ve talked about… Mass Effect is a game we get compared to in pretty much every interview, and it’s not something that we feel has ripped off Star Trek*. I think what they’ve done with their franchise has been remarkable. They have told amazing stories, the gameplay is incredibly well done. But when you are making this game we looked at that game, and said “we can’t make what they’ve done, because they have done it as well as they can do it.” We want to make a Star Trek game which could really stand on its own without being a copy of somebody else’s game.

Springboarding from the Star Trek IP to Paramount. Something that really interests me is the way that Paramount is part of ViaCom, a $15 billion business… It’s a different corporate structure and an entirely different revenue stream from your traditional games company.

Going back 3 years to when you rebooted the IP – on one level your objective is to make a great game, and to make a successful game, but in terms of the brand strategy, and of Star Trek as a Paramount property, and ultimately as a moneymaker, how do you see your role?

I think that’s why we had to make the game this way. It wasn’t a game that we licensed out. It wasn’t as if we got a phone call from Namco that said “hey, we’re going to pay you a bunch of money, we want to make this game.” We felt the brand was very important to us and that’s what JJ and the team achieved with the film in 2009 in reintroducing Star Trek the way it should be was something we had to take very seriously. If we created a subpar game, there would be no recovery from that.

We would not have been able to say “We’re going to do it right next time.” Fans would have said “It’s another movie-based game, it’s not worth it”.

So, we wanted to make sure that we were making a game that really could support that brand – the rebrand, now – and we felt the way to do that was to do it ourselves. To really fund this game, with our own money. Not to do the traditional licensed route, which is to take an upfront guarantee and then hope that things turn out [well]. We have been very fortunate to work with amazing partners: we got to hand-pick our developers. We got to work directly with Namco [Bandai] and bring them on board. And it was done in a way that wasn’t just “let’s put a piece of merchandise out there.” We wanted to do something that was really special.

And because you have that closeness I guess, you did have the opportunity to start thinking about the moment the film was greenlit. And following on from that, it is a very Forbes question, but in terms of relationships with the actors, and the creative team and Bad Robot, however Leon could you start having this conversations about using their images and retaining her voice talents?

Day one. It was day one. We sat down that day and really brainstormed. What kind of game do we want to make? If we are going to do this, what shall we do? Who are the developers we like? We knew we wanted to play as Kirk and Spock, so we made very initial calls to all the talent and said “are you up for this?” And they were very excited to be a part of it, not just a part of the new franchise in the new film but to bring Star Trek to a space that hadn’t been done in that way.

I mentioned in the presentation that they would do it if everybody was involved. There was that kind of camaraderie, and that kind of specialness that lends itself to the movie and certainly lends itself to when you’re playing a game.

And as you say, there are different ways of doing a licence. We just had Aliens: Colonial Marines come out, which has been a bit of a firestorm. But looking forwards, obviously you are waiting on the performance of this game, but Paramount has a bunch of IP’s. Upcoming, we have World War Z. We have GI Joe. There are things in the pipeline that are exploitable IP is as well as movies. What does Star Trek: the Video Game need to do, from your perspective, to justify using the same process, the same day and date start, looking for a partner on day one for the videogame, for more Paramount IPs?

You know, it really is going to depend on the IP. I think there are some amazing licensed games. You mentioned some of our other films, and we have certainly been talking at length about what we could do with some of those other properties. But there are some amazing developers, and some amazing publishers – and Namco is one of them. If we got a call fro an amazing developer, who worked on some of the games that we love, saying “listen, we love the properties you did…”

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‘Author’s note – arguably, Mass Effect was creatively influenced by the worldbuilding of Babylon 5, among many other sources, which in turn draws from Star Trek, and which in turn found itself up against the Star Trek brand extension Deep Space 9, which also involved a space station serving as neutral territory for various spacefaring races.’

***

B5 was based more on mythology than Trek – something that is clear when you look at some of JMS’s other projects, including his stint on the Spiderman comics. That B5 ended up being aired at the same time as DS9 was accidental, both shows were developed independently of each other and with different premises. This is something that has been noted by the producers and writers of both shows at different times – neither of whom have so much as hinted at feeling the other show ‘borrowed’ ideas from them.

That said if one of the two shows (and their respective franchises) borrowed from the other it was Trek taking from B5. It was Trek who started using arcing story lines in DS9, and later Enterprise. Something that B5 had been doing since its pilot – indeed there are plot points in B5′s pilot episode that were not explained until the third season, and in some cases fifth season of the shows run. Prior to this, and on Voyager later on, Trek had ignored the idea of story arcs in favour of stand alone episodes.

Geek tirade over ;)

***

I think that this might prove to be the correct way to have film tie in games in future, at least for films where there is more background story than could possibly be fitted into the film itself. With Star Trek XI one of the major complaints was that in order to make sense of a lot of the plot you effectively had to buy a comic book series – Something that annoyed me rather a lot at the time. This way around they could ‘explain’ some plot points in a more interesting way by using the game.

Indeed – although JMS also expressed his frustration that DS9 went ahead unchanged even after B5 had launched, fearing that B5 would be bulldozered. This, of course, was from a simpler age in TV terms, when it was not expected that consumer psephology would result in several conceptually very similar TV shows being launched simultaneously.

(And if by “mythology” you mean “the cultural history of the western canon” then sure – however, mythological references are of course _also_ a staple of sci-fi, and have been for as long as there has been sci-fi (Vulcans! Romulans! Martians!).

The “tie-in” is interesting. I get the distinct impression that this story is going to be reasonably distinct from the movie, although I’ve spoken with Miller before and he feels that watching the movie having played the game is going to be a different and more ‘educated’ experience … but you’re absolutely right that it’s a tricky balance to strike. I tend to think of this as the Kai Leng problem these days. In Mass Effect 3, Kai Leng sort of pops up as the Illusive Man’s underboss. There’s plenty of backstory to him in the dependent universe, but I feel like the game was writing a narrative cheque there which the supporting material was sort of supposed to cash.

(Of course, the job of a game studio is, first and foremost, to make a good _game_. The presence of characters from the comic book in the game of the Walking Dead is a nice Easter egg, but it doesn’t affect the way the game plays at all. You never feel that you, the player, are being penalized for not having read the series…)

The mythology I was talking about in B5 comes from, amongst other places, Babylonian mythology, appropriately enough. In this regard B5 is closer to Star Wars than Star Trek as George Lucas drew on world mythologies when writing what would become Star Wars. (This is clearly stated in SW documentaries produced just prior to the production of the prequels. JMS noted the Babylonian mythology connections both in commentaries he made for the DVD’s and in online blogs at the time the B5 episodes were originally aired – B5 was one of the very first TV shows to use the internet to reach out to viewers, which at the time was a very new idea.)

The difference in both cases seems to be development time. Both Babylon 5 and Star Wars were written and developed over several years before being picked up and filmed – which is why in both cases what you see on screen is more or less what was written. Trek, in comparison, never had such a long development time nor a creator who seems to have been interested in mythology.

Games designers should probably take note of this, especially those creating RPG’s. As I’ve noted before what makes many games so good is having a setting that feels ‘real’. Bioware used to be very good at doing this, and for all their flaws Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect and even Jade Empire worked because they’d spent a long time developing the world in which they were set. The Witcher series works for the same reason, although in this case CD Red was working with a world that had already been created for them to a large degree. You could say the same for games such as L.A. Noire or even Alien VS Predator.

Games built to support films can suffer because they don’t usually have this option, or worse think they don’t need to bother as someone else has done all the work – which they have but only what is needed for some 2 hours of film. Trek games *should* be able to avoid this given the amount of ‘background’ available, but often developers are given limited access to the filmmakers and/or very early scripts and artwork to work from. The best they can expect is that some or all of the cast will be available for voice work.

In film there is a limit to how much back story you can put in and how much of the world you can show. After all a film is a story that you sit down and experience from start to finish all at once. Games, however, have the option to allow the ‘viewer’ to sit back and catch their breath and smell the virtual roses. So you can drop in additional material for them to read/view while they are doing this or just want to do something other than follow the main story for a while. Again, Mass Effect and Dragon Age Origins allow players to do this as do the Batman Arkham games. Unfortunately developers seem to forgetting that the ability to do this is a bonus, not a requirement, and that they still need to treat the main story as something that players will be experiencing in a similar way to a film – that is experiencing it without a break. It also seems that in the case of developers such as EA/Bioware they are trying to create a franchise where multiple products tie together. Coupled with absurdly short development cycles this makes it very tempting to get lazy and leave material to be revealed outside the game in books, comics or short films. There is nothing wrong with this as long as the stories can stand alone – you don’t have to read any of the Mass Effect books or comics to make sense of the games. But it IS a problem when the ‘main’ story has gigantic plot holes that you can only explain by reading this other material. The last Trek film is the classic case, in that unless you happen to have read this other material you have to wonder why a mining ship has enough firepower to wipe out entire fleets and worlds. (For those who don’t know the reason is that they stole advanced technology…although that still leaves the question as to how they knew where to look for that technology. I can only guess that the Romulan’s use some form of honour system when it comes to the location and inventory of their important ‘secret’ facilities.)

By giving developers direct access to the filmmakers you sort out a lot of the problems they would otherwise run into. They don’t have to worry about visual design, since someone else is doing that for the film and they can use those designs as they are – probably more so these days where a lot of special effects are done purely inside a computer and the models can (presumably) be handed over to games designers to use. This should allow such games to tie in more closely than has been the case, as well as allowing developers to concentrate on game play without having to sacrifice the ‘feel’ of the world.

True movie tie-in games tend to fall flat because most of them are seen very clearly for what they are – promotional pieces designed to get people to see the movie. They don’t stand on their own and feel rushed and incomplete, and after the movie in question is gone from the theaters, there’s zero future for such a game. I think, too, this is related to the failure of the recent Aliens game. It seems like a rushed and slapdash movie tie-in, just 25 years after the fact.

I think the future of IP promotion in games should have less to do with one-off games like these and more with nurturing an independent series of games, or even an MMO, much like how Paramount does with Star Trek Online. STO sells the Trek universe far more convincingly than games like the one discussed here.

‘Historically’ games that are based on existing film franchises tend not to do that well, regardless of if they are tied into a specific film or not. Both Trek and Wars have some 30 or so games to their credit, of which very few proved to be successful and none of those I can think of were released to support a film or TV release of something else. (This, again, may relate to development time. Basically games that are developed without an eye towards ‘supporting’ anything specific can have a more flexible release date.)

MMO’s are an entirely different breed of game, and one that has been shown to be VERY high risk even if they are based on or in an existing franchise. Star Wars has tried MMO’s twice, first with Galaxies (defunct) then with The Old Republic (Allegedly cost $200 million plus to develop and which had such low subscription numbers they had to move to a free to play model). Trek has only tried once that I know of, and even here STO has ended up having to move to a free to play model. Given that Trek and War’s have massive followings any half decent MMO based on them *should* have been successful. That they haven’t been goes to show that MMO’s are very risky ventures no matter what type of ‘support’ they may have from that brand.

I think “MMOs are risky” should probably be spraypainted onto the largest of all publishers’ HQs. Or at least “subscription MMOs don’t really work unless you can go back in time and make yours incredibly popular 10 years ago”… We can add to STO and SWTOR The Secret World, Age of Conan, Tera…. then the MMOs which didn’t even try a subscription model at launch…

I guess the main problem is that developers look at World of Warcraft and start dribbling at the thought of all the money that Blizzard has made over the last 8 and a half years. Indeed, it appears that EA’s takeover of Bioware was prompted by Lucasarts deciding to grant them the licence to make what would become The Old Republic.

What they forget is how much time and effort is required to not only make an MMO that works, but how much ‘creative endurance’ you need to keep it working and ‘fresh’. Star Wars Galaxies, for example, was fairly well received when it was launched but very quickly turned players off with poorly thought out ideas implemented later on.

I think a better idea would be if developers required all MMO ideas to be written up and placed in a urinal for a week. That way only the most dedicated of individuals will be willing to touch the idea, and the will have a much better idea of how things are likely to turn out.

I think, ultimately, it’s not that MMOs are inherently risky, but that too many studios have plowed far too much money into certain MMO titles with the assumption that if they just spend enough money, people will play, no matter what the end product is. That might work with a single boxed copy of a game, but it doesn’t work at all when you have to retain customers over the lifetime of a game.

SWTOR in particular was shocking for how much money they spent and when the end result fared so poorly. More games need to start small and then ramp up. They repeatedly overpromise and underdeliver.